Author Monique Saigal-Escudero visits Googler's headquarters in Mountain View, CA, to discuss her book "Héroines françaises 1940-1945: courage; force et ingéniosité" also known as "French Heroines 1940-1945: Courage, Strength and Ingenuity". For more info, please visit www.collegenews.org
Monique Saigal is a professor of French at Pomona College, in Claremont, California. She teaches courses in French literature, French films and French culture. Monique's first book entitled Lécriture, lien de mère à fille chez Jeanne Hyvrard, Chantal Chawaf et Annie Ernaux explored the mother-daughter relationship as metaphor in the works of three contemporary French writers. Her latest book, French Heroines 1940-1945: Courage, Strength and Ingenuity, shares the stories of eighteen women in the French Resistance who are little known yet who stood out because of their extraordinary courage.
Professor Monique Saigal, a child Holocaust survivor, was taken in by a Catholic family in 1942 and wanted to honor the women profiled in her book as well as her grandmother, who perished at Auschwitz. Eager to discover the secrets of other women in the Resistance like Lucie Aubrac, she crisscrossed France, Switzerland and California to film and hear them tell their own stories. Reading these accounts takes us back to a time of terror when women fought back with every ounce of strength and wit at their disposal. We find out who they were, why they fought against the enemy at such a young age and what they did during the war and after.
